Spring Cleaning Your Website

Spring has sprung. The birds are in the trees, the heavy winter clothes are gone. People are up in their attics or out in their garages piling up their old unwanted junk to sell to their neighbors and to make room for the new junk that they’ll be buying from their neighbors.

Why not take this time to take a fresh look at your site and the success of your marketing efforts?

Sometimes you can be so deep into the inner workings of your site that you can forget some of the smaller items that you looked at 18 months ago and decided to fix "later," and sometimes you just don’t notice the little things that have crept in over time.

Search Yourself

For example, when was the last time you actually did some searches for your key terms? Do you see what you expect?

Not a great advertisement for the official site for the top league in the top sport in the UK. Now, Hull were relegated from the Premier League several seasons ago, and the page currently throws up errors when you visit it, so it’s obviously not as well maintained as the pages for those teams that are actively in the Premier League.

However, it still ranks for the key term “Hull City”, and based on the promotion/relegation system in place they may make it back there in the near future, so there’s no need to remove it (a 302 may perhaps be an option, but 3-50 years may be too long to realistically have one in place). That said, the errors on the page and in the description need to be fixed (indeed between writing and publication the description has been corrected, although the on page errors remain).

What about for your actual brand terms? Are your sitelinks still relevant? Has some minor page incorrectly surfaced in the sitelinks? Or has something more sinister happened?

Instant Issues

How about the suggestions in Google Instant? What’s showing up around your brand? Is it something that you maybe need to address? I have to say that I was concerned when I did a search for a hotel I was planning on staying at in NYC and saw the following.

That made me look closer at the results for that search to see whether I really wanted to stay there. The results all stated that there wasn’t a problem at that hotel, and after staying there I have to concur. But one wonders how much business the hotel potentially lost due to that suggestion being displayed so prominently for the time it was.

What could/should they have done? Perhaps a PPC campaign targeted to that specific phrase that went to a bed bugs and the hotel landing page that showed some certification or a clean bill of health from a regulatory body would have been enough to assuage any waverers concerned with the suggested search term.

Eat Your Own Dog Food

When was the last time you went through your purchase process or your registration process from beginning to end? In other words: Do you regularly consume your own products? Or are you waiting on users, or perhaps a drop in sales figures to inform you of issues?

Inspect Yourself Regularly

When was the last time you re-audited your site from top to bottom? Because you fixed things a year ago, do you assume that they’re still fixed now? That no developer has removed something that you put in place because they weren’t aware of its value? Do you re-evaluate your templates? Are you keeping on top of your broken links and redirection errors?

Online marketing is by no means a ‘set it and forget it’ endeavor. The landscape is one of shifting sands that requires a steady hand to ensure that the strategic foundations remain sound.

While it’s great to be able to focus on new and exciting projects to expand your reach, just remember every now and again to lift your head up, and take a look around to see what junk you’ve accumulated that you can get rid of now.

About the author

Simon Heseltine is the Director in charge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at AOL Inc.In this role Simon and his team are responsible for organic search and training across all AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties.He has also visited the UK office on several occasions to consult and train the AOL-UK teams on SEO best practices.

In his previous position as Director of Search at a Washington, D.C., based agency, Simon was responsible for developing and implementing organic search and social media strategies for companies across several industries.He also developed and delivered training programs for clients, including a large U.S. media company, to enable them to best take advantage of the opportunities available to their companies through both organic search and social media.

Simon is a frequent speaker at conferences in the U.S. and UK on topics ranging from SEO to social search to reputation management.He also teaches SEO at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., as part of their Digital Media Management program.

Simon has a BA (Hons) from the University of Humberside, and a Masters in IT from Virginia Tech.

More on Analytics

The Google Analytics Cohort Analysis can be extremely useful in helping SEOs prove the value of new customer acquisition via organic search, show how they engaged with the site, and surface when they ended up converting over time.
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